A Journey, chapter 10, "Managing Crises". In which our hero again reproaches himself. "The fox-hunting subject resulted in one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret," writes Tony Blair. "I used to have meetings with my advisers or the whips and just sit there and say: but people cannot feel that strongly about it; it's impossible." His whips were right: people did. In his own memoirs, Chris Mullin is pleased to recall fox welfare as "easily the most popular issue" at a 2001 manifesto meeting of the parliamentary party, ahead of Railtrack, student loans and opposition to the missile defence shield.

"The passions aroused by the issue were primeval," Blair recollects. Gerald Kaufman, for example, told him: "If you don't do this, I could never support the government again." Mercifully, Mr Kaufman was sufficiently reassured on the fox cruelty question to go on to support the Iraq war. Last week, it fell to a Tory, Mark Pritchard, to assume the Kaufman mantle and, incidentally, demonstrate to Mr Cameron that chapter 10 of A Journey was one he definitely should not have skipped. Had he been paying attention he would have known: of all the backbench insurrection ahead, the challenge to watch was the one featuring an elephant, name of Anne.

Perhaps, on the other hand, it cannot harm Cameron's party that, notwithstanding his leadership, it now commands respect from every animal rights fanatic in the country. Virtually every speaker in last week's debate attested – as if anyone would doubt it – to the prodigious number of constituents' letters they received on this topic. Why, demanded Pritchard, wasn't the government responding to "the will of the people"?

In Pritchard, the Conservatives have surely found their very own Rosa Parks, not a meek sempstress, admittedly, but the next best thing: in his words, "a council lad from a very poor background". Expect, in years to come, celebrations of Pritchard's anniversary, when children re-enact the moment this humble, animal-loving lad stood up in the Commons to declare: "That background gives me a backbone, it gives me a thick skin and I am not going to be kowtowed by the whips on an issue that I feel passionately about."

That issue being, of course, the fate of the 39 wild animals currently captive in British circuses. That this number is low – in relation, say, to the number of battery hens now in cages (16 million) – was held, depending on which side you were on, to be a decisive argument for a ban or, for those heretical enough to speak up, proof that there are more deserving subjects for parliamentary time. But since the argument was about primeval feelings, or as Pritchard preferred, "passion", or as 18th-century cynics might have put it, a preening, narcissistic display of sentiment, the numbers hardly mattered.

In the course of this remarkably harmonious debate, competitive only in demonstrations of extreme compassion, we were introduced to individual animals – not just Anne the elephant but her fellow circus survivors, Colonel Bob Stewart's bear, and Donkey, the Barbary macaque.

Much like the boarding school survivor, David Cameron, Donkey was taken from his mother's side at a tragically young age and ended up performing in public, for money. Now resident in the Cornwall constituency of Sheryll Murray (Con), the damaged primate is beginning to recover from his years of deprivation. "Hon members are down our way during the recess," Ms Murray said. "They should pop in and see the sanctuary, because Donkey and all his friends would love to see them."

But who would Donkey like to see replace him in the big top? Would a dog do the trick? A horse? How, as Ed Miliband must often wonder, do you replace a really talented primate? It was, on the face of it, a terror of avenging circuses (as opposed to Cameron's love of hunting) that explained the government's preference for the licensing of performing wild animals, rather than a ban. Dismissing EU retaliation, circus-preferences apparently being an area of national self-determination, MPs emphasised that human acts are exciting enough to satisfy the most demanding audience (none of them, presumably, having seen recent work by the Cirque du Soleil).

Supposing Pritchard is right, and his longed-for law is not going to be obstructed by Austrian animal trainers claiming the human right to torture elephants, the exit of 39 circus animals could represent, if nothing else, 39 precious job opportunities for human applicants, eager to find a warm cage, maybe with a little hay at the bottom, before the colder weather sets in.

As much, however, as you pity any creature that is born free, only to be confined and neglected by its supposed carers, that cannot give elderly people the right to a cosy berth in a circus. It is, conforming with a tradition dating back over 200 years, the convention in Britain that we measure our worth as a civilisation through our treatment of animals. And, because otherwise that would sound bad, of children.

"There is a maxim that suggests the hottest corner of hell is reserved for those who are cruel to children and animals," confirmed the Labour MP Jim Dowd, speaking in support of Pritchard. For those who are cruel to old people, of course, there are jobs in NHS hospitals, and care homes, and in local authorities.

Carers might, for example, offer an elderly captive the choice between food and a wash. In hospitals, a new study found that elderly and bedridden patients may go without water for 10 hours at a time, be served meals when they are asleep, and obliged to eat with dirty hands. In one hospital they were left in nightclothes all day and forced to wear nappies. A patient said she wanted to die. In another, patients had food spooned into their mouths like babies and were spoken to, said one patient, as if they were "daft".

The same, with the exception of extreme dehydration – how else would they do tricks? – no doubt applies to the 39 wild animals still in circuses. Still, if you were a spine-tinglingly brave 21st-century MP and determined, to the point of professional suicide, to address some great cause of suffering, would you start in the big top? Would circuses seem a more important cause than, say, those delicate yet social animals, old people? Or disabled people? Or, if it had to be non-humans, those edible animals soon to be raised here inside US-style factory farms?

Actually, given what circuses have done for Pritchard's reputation, with the Commons, celebrities and millions of constituents all cheering him on, he probably made the right choice. And as Lord Erskine argued, moving his Bill for Preventing Malicious and Wanton Cruelty to Animals in 1809: "The humanity you shall extend to the lower creation will come abundantly round, in its consequences, to the whole human race." We just need to wait a little longer.